Things Are Getting Spooky in One SCC Class

Published: 10/19/2021

SCC English Associate Professor Bryonie Carter has been reading scary stories since she was a kid.

“There was a ghost story book I would check out of the library almost every week when I was in second grade,” she admitted. “That fixation eventually led me to start reading books like Dracula and The Shining by the time I was 12-years old.”

Carter couldn’t get enough of the spooky tales. That’s still the case today. This semester, she’s teaching a horror fiction class.

“Right now, we are reading Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. It’s the first novel to feature the infamous Hannibal Lecter,” she explained. “We’ve also read a number of short stories by authors such as Shirley Jackson and Edgar Allan Poe.”

Aside from just reading frightening fiction, students in the class will also complete a creative final project. They will take everything they’ve learned in class and channel it into something meaningful for them.

SCC student Brooklyn Deshurley is thinking about heading to the haunted Lemp Mansion for her final project. She admits she didn’t always like the horror genre.

“I used to hate horror movies,” she laughed, “but I love them now. The class has been great. I have really liked all the discussions we’ve had about the different stories. It’s so fun to talk to people with different ideas!”

Carter says the class often looks at how race, class, gender and setting inform our understanding of the literature and its cultural context.

“I think that genre fiction is often overlooked by literary critics, as it is often perceived as simply ‘popular literature’ that is not as worthy of study,” Carter said. “I like to disrupt that stereotype in this class, as we find that much of what we read in horror literature gives us insight into our history, culture, and our perceptions of ourselves and one another.”